Babbar Review 2023: The French Alternative to Ahrefs

What is Babbar?

Babbar is a SaaS developed by a French team, led by brothers Guillaume and Sylvain Peyronnet, already well known for their tool YourText.Guru. The tool won the "best innovation in an SEO tool" award at SEO CAMP'us Paris 2022.

Babbar's promise is to cover the 3 pillars of SEO: technical, semantic, and netlinking. Babbar uses its own crawler to discover the web, and to date knows over 1,896,000,000,000 pages. Enough data to make competitors pale, and to have an accurate mapping of inter-site linking.

Features

Without further ado, let's dive into the tool to discover its main and hidden features.

Domain Analysis

The tool's main function is domain analysis via proprietary indicators. You can analyze at 3 levels: URL, Host (subdomain), and Domain. You end up with a number of metrics and new terminology to learn:

Host Value (HV): Equivalent of Majestic's Citation Flow -- a score based on the number of links pointing to the domain.
Host Trust (HT): Equivalent of Majestic's Trust Flow -- a score based on link authority.
Semantic Value (SV): A score based on the thematic relevance of links.
HTTP Health: The health status of the subdomain or domain.
BAS: A proprietary algorithm that aggregates data to produce an overall score.

History

The history feature allows you to track the evolution of certain metrics for a domain or subdomain over time.

Near Duplicate

This function quickly identifies duplicate content within a domain or subdomain. Ideal for rapidly discovering this type of issue.

Induced Strength (BIS)

The Induced Strength is one of the most incredible assets of this tool. It calculates the semantic power that a link has, or would have, between two pages.

By entering source URLs and target URLs, you get a table showing the Induced Strength (IS) for each pair -- the semantic power if a link existed between those two pages.

This is ideal for link buyers. If you want to buy a link on an existing page, the BIS immediately tells you whether it has value or not.

Similar Domains

This function quickly finds semantically similar sites. Ideal for spotting competitors or future partners.

Internal Linking Suggestions

This function quickly uncovers internal linking opportunities between 2 pages that share a very close theme.

Position Tracking

This feature bundles 4 sub-features, including keyword count evolution by position group. Note that Babbar does not offer custom keyword tracking.

Neighborhood

This is probably my favorite feature, even though it's not yet perfect. It visualizes the inter-site link graph at X levels from you. Ideal for spotting PBNs and other site networks.

Other Features

Backlink list (by URL, subdomain, or domain)
Main anchors list
Internal links pointing to a page
Outgoing links list
Links by country of origin
Page ranking by Trust, Value, or Semantic Value
Page list by HTTP response code
SpotFinder: enter a keyword and get a list of sites where you can build links

Babbar's Limitations

The tool is incredible and I use it daily. However, it also has its drawbacks.

UX

Like YourText.Guru, the user experience needs polishing. Terminology is sometimes hard to understand, indicators are not exactly clear, and the interface changes depending on which page you are on.

Too Much Non-Actionable Data

Another issue compared to the competition is the lack of quickly actionable data. You find yourself drowning in data that is hard to sort. As a data fanatic, I manage, but it will be difficult for newcomers without intensive training.

Missing Key Functions

Impossible to view keyword count evolution for domains on a curve.
The neighborhood screen does not allow filtering (TLD, BAS, BL, RD, etc.).
Filters are absent from most listing pages.

Pricing

The base plan is 90 euros excl. tax per month or 960 euros per year. This is quite affordable compared to tools offering the same features.

Conclusion

Babbar is a brilliant tool on almost every level: data, features, and team + support. The only downside remains the interface and its learning curve.

It doesn't fully replace Ahrefs, but I wouldn't be surprised to see some people drop Ahrefs after experiencing Babbar.

I strongly recommend Babbar to experienced SEOs or data enthusiasts who know what they're looking for. Tested, approved, and adopted!